No matter how I contort
and perform and stretch
and dance for you
criticism is first to escape your lips.
Always swallowing your praise,
As if being great is my everyday expectation
you could crush me like a bug underneath your ego and your pride

I wonder sometimes if we’ve been playing tug of war
I’ve been pulling our collective weight for so long
You make me think I’m winning,
you let me take a breath
Not a minute goes by and I’m already lunging forward
I’ve had to learn to put up my defenses
Learn to strike when you’re weakest
And I know you’re testing your strength
Trying to catch me when I’ve exhausted my options

I’m just the lightning rod atop someone else’s home
I’m made to absorb the shock
To comfort and protect in the storm
But when not necessary I sit forgotten
And rust in unfavorable weather

You are a force of nature
You have taken me through continents
Tasted cuisines, walked terrains
On your skin is a map of where we’ve been
A blueprint of our experiences
Tracing your birthmarks, constellations
You carried me but I never thanked you enough
Or loved you enough
Not the way you deserved

Have you ever wanted to crawl out of the skin you’re in?
And I don’t mean what you see when you look in the mirror,
Something as obvious as outward appearance
I mean escape the inner workings, the machinery that makes me tick and move and break and cry
Because when it does break, as it so often does, it renders me helpless and useless
I’d like a thicker barrier, to put up protection on the outside
So as the inside corrodes and the gears become misaligned, as I squeak under the weight of my age and emotions
I should at least be able to cover myself with a pretty plastic wall
So the outside never matches

I think of the girl I was just a few years ago
A happy girl
She never felt like something was missing from her
She never saw in others what she lacked
Every experience was exciting because it was new and it was thrilling
What happened to her
Now every time I see myself I see cracks and I see pieces
I feel like I am floating above myself watching myself move through motions
I look at others only to see my lack
I cling onto the wisps of memory of innocence and think about when I was greener
Nostalgia

Do you know what it feels like
To have never experienced that teenage puppy love
The innocent kind where all you do in the first 6 months is kiss and hold hands and thats okay
To have lost your opportunity to be someone’s first love
To have been someone’s person, the one everyone after will be compared to
Instead i am the one that gets used to recapture the juvenile spirit they longed for
I am the one who they exploit every inch of while they imagine touching the first girl
I wish someone could take 22 away from me and crush it underneath the weight of their expectations